Really, you think this would have cost $33M if a Fortune 500 firm was paying? Enterprises overpay a little because managers are spending shareholders money. Governments overpay a lot because bureaucrats are spending tax payers money. There is a lot less accountability in the latter.
Yes, I really do think so. It's a nice theory re:accountability, but I don't think it holds up in the real world, where enterprise-contracting costs, for whatever reason, are extremely high. One possibility is that there isn't as much accountability for managers of large companies as you think (there's been a lot written on that problem); another possibility is that there are somehow inherent scale problems with doing bespoke software development for very large organizations.
